When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook username and password.

Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn’t see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information.

Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn’t want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and some of them cannot afford to say no.

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person’s social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

“It’s akin to requiring someone’s house keys,” said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it “an egregious privacy violation.”

Questions have been raised about the legality of the practice, which is also the focus of proposed legislation in Illinois and Maryland that would forbid public agencies from asking for access to social networks.

CONTINUED at WTOP.

Counting Twitter mentions would have you believe that Ron Paul is the most popular Republican candidate in the ongoing U.S. primaries. Umm, right.

But some social media analysis of politics is going beyond that. A partnership between Facebook and Politico announced today is one of the more far-reaching efforts. It will consist of sentiment analysis reports and voting-age user surveys, accompanied by stories by Politico reporters.

Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will includeFacebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.

Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.

This is similar to the way Google offers reports on search trends based on its users’ aggregate search activities.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Summary: A U.S. District Court is to allow users’ of Facebook to sue the social network, after California state ‘publicity’ law was thought to have been infringed.

*Taken from CNN.

Apparently, “Anonymous” won’t be accepting your friend request.

Members of the shadowy collective known for its politically motivated Web hacks and attacks are targeting Facebook for what they claim to be the social-networking giant’s misuse of personal information.

“Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed,” the speaker said in a YouTube video, which was posted July 16 but started circulating widely this week.

Using a voice modulator to disguise his (or her) voice, the speaker, who purports to represent Anonymous, invites viewers to “join the cause and kill Facebook for the sake of your own privacy.”

CONTINUED..

*Taken from Lifehacker.

You may not be ready to ditch Facebook for good, but now that you’ve had a chance to kick the tires on Google+, you might be ready to make it your go-to social network. The problem: You’ve built up a lot of friends, photos, videos, and other data on Facebook over the years, and you don’t want to simply lose all that data. Here’s how to migrate it all from Facebook to Google+.

When Google+ came out, it’s success was very much up in the air (remember Google Buzz?). However, it seems a lot of people have already thrown themselves into Google+ full force—Facebook may have 750 million users, but Google+ has already crossed the 20 million user milestone in only 30 days. If you’re ready to give it a shot as your main network, here’s what you need to do.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from InventorSpot.

Google seems to be unshaken by all its missteps, lawsuits and flawed attempts at seeking social media’s holy grail - as it makes yet another attempt at trying to beat Facebookat its own game. This time out, it’s launching a social networking service called the Google+ project which while looking a lot like Zuckerberg’s brain child – is in a lock-down beta mode, only accessible to a select group of testers, hand-picked by the Big G (note: if you link here, and come up with an error message, you’ll know you were not amongst the chosen few!)

So what does the Google+ project offer that Orkut, Buzz, the Wave, Google Me, and Google+1 lacked? The main difference is sharing with groups versus individuals – like your fishing buddies, cubicle cohorts, or any other type of affinity group you can think up. …Hmmmm, wasn’t this what old school Ning was all about, a couple of years back? And wasn’t that experiment a dismal failure, when they moved to a paid monetization model?

Nevertheless, Google is once again back in the trenches trying to carve out its own niche of followers. The question is, how do you play catch-up with a social network Goliath the LIKES of Facebook (pun intended)? Just duplicating the look and feel of Facebook makes you look more like a copycat than an innovator.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from Just Jared.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have dropped their case against Facebookfounder Mark Zuckerberg, according toTMZ.

The 29-year-old olympic rowers’ legal battles were famously depicted in the movie The Social Network, which starred Armie Hammer as both twins.

The twins settled for $65 million in stock options in 2008, but went back to court after Zuckerberg supposedly hid documents from them, which could have proved the stock had more value.

After trying to invalidate the settlement for the past few years, the twins have officially dropped the case.

The stock in the settlement has reportedly grown to $100 million in value!

*Taken from BBC.

It has been revealed that Facebook embarked on a smear campaign against rival Google.

The social network has admitted that it hired a PR firm to plant anti-Google stories related to user privacy.

The details came to light when one blogger approached by PR firm Burson-Marsteller published the e-mail exchange.

Burson had been touting stories on behalf of an unnamed client about the Google service Social Circle.

Blogger Chris Soghain did not want to pursue the story and later released the e-mails he had exchanged with Burson.

When the e-mails were published there was a mass of rumours about who the client could be, with Microsoft and Apple in the frame.

CONTINUED..

*Taken from NY Daily News. Video at the link.

Maybe he’s a MySpace guy.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called Facebook ”the most appalling spying machine ever invented” in an interview with Russia Today, pointing to the popular social networking site as one of the top tools for the U.S. to spy on its citizens.

“Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US Intelligence,” he said. “Facebook, Google, Yahoo, all these major U.S. organizations have built-in infaces for US intelligence.

“Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook they are doing free work for the United States intelligence agencies,” he added.

The comments were a bit strange, coming from the founder of a website best known for pushing spilling secret information.

In an email to the Daily News, a Facebook spokesman denied the company was doing anything that they weren’t legally obligated to do, saying that “the legal standards for compelling a company to turn over data are determined by the laws of the country, and we respect that standard.”

“We don’t respond to pressure, we respond to compulsory legal process,” the spokesperson wrote. “There has never been a time we have been pressured to turn over data — we fight every time we believe the legal process is insufficient.”

In any event, many Facebook users have been increasingly concerned about the sharing of their information.

In 2010, three Democratic senators asked the FTC to look at the social networking site’s information-sharing policies.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that popular Facebook apps like Farmville and Causes also shared users’ information with advertising and tracking companies.

Concerns about information-sharing has seemingly done little to dissuade the more than 250 million people who use Facebook – including someone who created an official WikiLeaks page on the site.

More than 1.72 million people clicked that they like it.

Assange is currently in England, awaiting extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault charges.

*Taken from the Wall Street Journal.

President Barack Obama will travel to Facebook Inc.’s Silicon Valley headquarters Wednesday to hold a “town hall” meeting on the economy with users of the social-networking site.

But Facebook is still trying to find a path to Washington, where the company has only a fledgling lobbying operation, even though it finds its privacy policies under increasing scrutiny and is trying to navigate a politically sensitive expansion into China.

In seven years, Facebook has risen from a tiny start-up to an Internet power with a potential market value estimated at more than $50 billion. Now an online forum with more than 600 million users, Facebook faces growing pressure from lawmakers and regulators concerned about the way it uses personal information shared by its users.

At the same time, the company is confronting questions about how it will handle its role as a global public square for dissidents if it enters China and other countries with little tolerance for dissent. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal about its approach abroad, Facebook officials in Washington suggested the company might be willing to play by China’s rules—a stance that could raise hackles in Congress.

Until lately, Facebook has spent very little money in Washington, even by Silicon Valley’s frugal standards. The company’s outlays on lobbying totaled $351,000 last year, federal records show. That’s a fraction of the amount spent by other technology giants, including Google Inc.’s $5.2 million and Microsoft Corp.’s $6.9 million.

Facebook’s new Washington office, designed to look like a hacker’s lair, with walls of faux construction rubble, is a work in progress.

People familiar with the company’s plans said talks to hire former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs to guide the company’s communications strategy, including with Washington, have fallen apart in the wake of a leak to the media that made a deal for him to join the company sound imminent. Facebook declined to comment.

Meanwhile, Facebook is talking with potential Chinese partners about entering the huge China market, where the government has been cracking down on dissidents. That crackdown has come in response to the uprisings shaking authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes, movements that have used U.S.-based social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter as organizing tools.

“Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others,” Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the Journal. “We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we’re allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven’t experienced it before,” he said.

“Right now we’re studying and learning about China but have made no decisions about if, or how, we will approach it,” said Debbie Frost, Facebook’s director of international communications.

Facebook’s plans may not sit well with congressional leaders already incensed with the company for sidestepping congressional inquiries on its China plans. Last spring, Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee’s panel on human rights, rebuked Facebook for refusing to appear at a Capitol Hill hearing on “global Internet freedom.”

The company hasn’t joined the Global Network Initiative, a group that includes information-technology companies like Google and Microsoft and human-rights groups that have agreed to common principles of conduct in nations such as China, which restrict speech and expression.

Neither Facebook nor its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, have said much publicly about Facebook’s role as a tool for pro-democracy activists in Tunisia or Egypt. In Tunisia, where Facebook took technical steps to counter government efforts to steal users’ Facebook passwords, the company said its efforts were driven by a safety and security breach—not politics.

“We’ve witnessed brave people of all ages coming together to effect a profound change in their country. Certainly, technology was a vital tool in their efforts but we believe their bravery and determination mattered most,” Ms. Frost said.

Steering clear of association with human-rights issues could help Facebook woo officials in China, where the government is sensitive to the Internet’s potential for fomenting dissent. But it would also attract criticism. “Blocking content in some countries—but not others—would deeply damage Facebook’s brand and raise troubling questions about its commitment to human rights and Internet freedom,” said Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate’s human- rights panel.

Online privacy is an equally pressing policy issue for Facebook’s Washington office. Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, recently co-sponsored legislation that would establish a consumer privacy bill of rights. House lawmakers, meanwhile, have introduced privacy legislation that would require more disclosure to consumers but rely on industry self-regulation.

In mid-January, Facebook came under fire after it opened up a new feature allowing external websites and applications to gain access to users’ addresses and phone numbers, with their permission.

Two weeks later, the company received a pointed letter from Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, and Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, demanding an explanation of how the plan fit into the company’s privacy policies.

White House spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said the president will answer online questions from Facebook users Wednesday. He won’t deliver prepared remarks addressing China or privacy issues with Facebook’s leadership. “Facebook, with more than a half a billion users, is a great opportunity for the president to speak directly to the American people,” she said.

In the past six months, Facebook has hired two outside lobbying firms and four new Washington staff members, bringing its staff head count to 10 at its D.C. office. Only two of those staffers are registered lobbyists, and they lack ties to the congressional committees that will lead the privacy debate.

People familiar with Facebook’s Washington plans said it is looking to hire more people with deeper congressional experience and bring on more seasoned communications and public-relations hands.